The Lands of Aethar, which ran from 1994 until 2009, has been shut down. I took the data files and used them to generate a frozen HTML snapshot of the MUD universe. This can be explored over any webclient; the address is: http://www.glowingfaceman.com/aethar/

I think the future of MUDs lies in more general HTTP support. Aethar doesn't *really* count because the world is frozen and "read-only", but I hope this project will be a kind of first step toward MUDs that can be played directly over port 80

It's an interesting way to showcase a static game world, and could be an excellent way to handle offline building, but I think you'd need to take a different route if you wanted to provide actual gameplay - such as embedding a mud client into the website, or using FastCGI (and cookies) to generate webpages on the fly.

This is great. It's like a record of a mud's areas and how they transitioned. Javascript or flash could do one even better by allowing for room echoes and other features of the virtual world to come to life in a "snapshot" of play.